It has been May since I posted to this blog. I have been overwhelmed with running my business, David's Music House, Inc. for the last two years and in these economic times, it has been a spectrum of highs and lows. This is the first business I have ever attempted and I knew it would have to be something that was connected to my passion and love of music, to get me through any difficulties. When a new business is started, it is often said that it will take 3 to even 5 years to see success. The idea is unique, the model is good and being tweaked and developed all the time but it is longevity and resources that are the critical piece. I continue, month to month, looking for ways to keep costs as low as possible while looking for new revenue sources and so far, I have been able to keep things going due to the support and help of a good many people!
In the meantime, I am going to try to amp up my posts on this blog. There's was just too much time spent on it and it has a good foundation to keep building upon to let it go of. I began blogging to become knowledgeable about social media while discovering that I loved to write so I need to continue developing those skills.
The Baby Boomer Generation is not going away.... yet, that is. We are getting older, to be sure. I was just realizing that I am finding more people who I graduated with who are passing away! I can remember my parents and their friends talking about the fact that they felt that all they were doing is going to funerals of friends.
As I have stated in previous posts about my small business venture and it being something I, as many Boomers are doing, am doing to be my "extended pre-retirement working years". Boomers have been told by financial advisers for quite a few years now, that we will not be enjoying the same type of "retirement" as our parents did. We will be working past 62 or 65 and beyond. I began thinking about this about ten years ago and knew that I really wanted to do something that I was more passionate about, which is music.
With Boomers being the largest segment of the population, whatever they do....is indeed, a factor that has a domino effect on many aspects of the country, with the main one being financial. As we Boomers age, all the aspects of aging will effect everyone in this country. What remains to be seen is how will the younger generation feel, react and care for their parents as we age. However Boomer children behave and react to their aging parents can not be blamed on how the Boomers raised their children anymore than the Boomers can blame on their parents, the Greatest Generation. We are each responsible for our own actions in our lives and responsible for the decisions we make.
If any readers of this blog have seen my other articles about what I have been doing lately, you may realize why I haven’t been active for quite a while on this blog, especially if any of you own or have ever owned your own business. The saying, “if it were easy, everyone would do it” is as true as true can be!
The purpose of this article will be to speak to why I haven’t been writing for a while and to bring my passion of sharing issues and raising awareness of The Baby Boomer Generation.
The short story from 2008 is that my job of 22+ years was outsourced at the beginnings of our country’s second biggest depression. I was unemployed for two years, while trying to look for a job and also deciding what else I could do. In 2009, I began my journey to create my own business, beginning with a “How to start a small business” course at a local community college, talking to my local SCORE representative and many other business mentors I either knew or just reached out to. I opened my business, David’s Music House, Inc. on October, 10, 2010 (10.10.10) I have now been open for 18 months and it has indeed been a journey of highs and lows! What I have learned is exactly what I was told in the beginning by all my mentors….it would be hard, it would take 3 to 5 years to see success and you can only succeed IF you don’t quit. The key to not quitting is continuing growth and searching for solutions for the dollars to last until success. It is indeed a FACT, that no one can succeed by quitting.
As I continue to search for ways to search for ways to make my business grow, I am also quite aware that I am still moving on the path of extending work years, or delay of retirement. I planned my business to be one that I not only have a passion for but also would be able to continue working beyond what were once considered retirement years. Being a member of the Baby Boomer Generation brings me to think about these actions that I and all of us Boomers are currently going through.
Only time and history will tell the true story of what effect the Baby Boomer Generation has had on our civilization, but there is no doubt that the Boomers effect our country by their sheer numbers. This applies for what this largest segment of the population is going through as we approach the retirement years. Retirement has been re-defined by occurrences of the last decade. Healthcare and new medical advances are continually extending the lifespan. While is definitely a good thing, from the perspective of us Boomers, what we do and go through has a profound effect on the course of all others as well.
Baby Boomers have been caring and dealing with their aging parents while we hit our 4th and 5th decades of life and we well know and wonder how our children will deal with the same issues. Will they even be able to deal with the impact of Boomers aging? One thing is certain and that is that we Boomers should be doing as much as we can to lessen the impact of what our children have to deal with….such as homes not cared for, estates not properly and legally planned, how to make decisions without living wills and legal documents to guide them.
I went into this segway of Boomers aging as that is what I am currently thinking about…..what do I need to do to deal with aging? How can I make it easier for my children to deal with my aging? One thing my wife and I have done is to create all the legal documentation, such as wills, living wills that clearly state and therefore take the decision and issues out of the hands of our children. We are also downsizing our home to one that we can more easily care for, is less of a financial burden for us rather than continue living in a home too large to care for so that they someday have to deal with their homes as well as ours.
It is important for us Boomers to do the same things we have been doing for our children since they were born…and that is everything we can to make them better people, follow the golden rule, try to make the planet better for them by recycling and paying attention to supporting better ways of energy consumption and prepare and clean up our lives so that they don’t have to do it. We are always parents, as long as we are on this planet, even if we don’t have children….all who remain after the Boomer Generation is gone are all of our children and they will benefit or not based on our actions.
There is a beginning of another new way the Baby Boomer Generation is changing what “retirement” will mean in the future occurring. This is resulting out of two driving forces, of which one is how the past decades of greed of the rich and powerful have destroyed what used to be thought of as retirement. The other is once again, just a natural result of the sheer size of this generation of people who were born between 1946 and 1964. Retirement is defined as, “the period of one’s life after leaving one’s job and ceasing to work”.
The generations previous to the Baby Boomers, “The Greatest Generation” was the first to actually do this. Previous to the industrial age, there really was no retirement, nor a need to do so, as the life expectancy was not long enough to know what that would have meant anyway. So, as the parents of the Boomers worked long hours of hard labor through their lives, they were able to save money to stop working the job they had for most of their lives and “enjoy” their elder years. The word, “enjoy” here is relative, as health issues, often brought on by a complete stopping of all activity and thought, deeply affected the amount of enjoyment realized by most. Now the Baby Boomers, who saw and just naturally thought this was what retirement meant and also knew that they would be forced to retire at a certain age, realized they must save for this part of their lives at some point. This is where the greed that took advantage of these life long savings comes to bear, followed by the realization that these life long savings were gone.
Once again, it’s time to be innovative and reinvent. Boomers are now changing what retirement means, which is to find what your best talents, put them to work, combined with your true passion and continue to work as long as your body and mind will allow. There is no need to quit working, in fact, stopping all work will remove one’s purpose and thus reason to live a longer and more purposeful life. My mother always said, “When you make yourself go to work, you stay healthy. When you take off is when you get sick”. How true that has become.
Since losing my corporate job of over 22 years in 2008, I have been searching for what I want to do when I grow up...or for the rest of my life. I knew it had to be something that I wanted to go do every day and that it had to have something to do with some of my best talents. My strongest passion has always been music, whether it was playing it or listening to it. Music is an expression of spirit and a language of the human species. It has much more of a profound affect on our lives than we can imagine, as much as the environment and planet we live on. It influences our behavior on a daily basis, even when we are not aware of it, through media and our surroundings.
Some of my other best passions involve behaviors between people. During those 22 corporate working years, I observed and learned how teams work together, how others manage or do not manage teams and how upper management disconnects from behaviors and talents of its core work force. There is a disconnect of how to get the best abilities from its corporate workers, so much so that a completely new industry grew out of the last 20 years. Many who were dissatisfied with the corporate environment found that they could go to these large businesses and provide some structure in how people behave with one another, with a method that corporate executives could buy into. Basically, this “Coaching” business was created out of the fact that the corporate business world totally lost its capability of how to understand how to treat people!
One of the fundamentals of human behavior is interacting with another person in a way that will allow cooperation with each other. When one chooses to work alone, that person quickly discovers the limits of their capabilities and realizes that they need someone else’s help to accomplish certain goals. The best way to enable this cooperation is to promote beneficial behavior among them, in other words, make a friend and they will help you. Large businesses became so deeply focused on the prime directive of profit and growth that they became dysfunctional in this key fundamental knowledge of how people work together as teams. This new Coaching industry was welcomed into the corporate world as a methodology of correcting this. (I find this completely amazing that large groups of people forget how to behave to others when they enter that corporate world, and become someone different than they are in their personal lives!)
This brings me back to another of my passions, and that is to make every member of a team or of any effort, feel that they are valued and have something to contribute to any goal. I knew that this is another passion that I must bring to my new business venture.
The third passion I have been developing over that last 20 years is innovative thinking. I found my corporate years very frustrating because, in spite of the fact that I worked in an area that was born from innovation, technology, my environment did not promote it. The corporate world has been throwing the word “innovation” around for the last 10 years, but most did not seem to really understand what it meant. The other aspect was really back to the lack of effort to find what employees do best, and matching their job with those abilities. One cannot assign a person to suddenly be “innovative”, as this is actually “creativity” and comes from a person who possesses a heightened ability of the part of the human brain that “creates”.
These passions, that have taken my last 50 years to develop and realize, will be absolutely key to the success of my own business. The ongoing need to focus my efforts on these key aspects must be centered as often as possible, as the day to day of business will tend to cloud this focus. This is where the love of what you are doing works for you. The enjoyment of doing something you love to do, always grounds you, to naturally make you do whatever it takes to keep that focus for success.
As the Boomers enter this latter phase of life and struggle through the transition of it, we may realize that the remedies for all the predicted health, social and ecological issues of the Baby Boomer Generation growing old, may just be the realization that we must continue to work forever for monetary reasons as well as providing the best “quality of life”.
Most of us Baby Boomers have been living a path of “what do you want to be when you grow up”? Our parents, part of the Greatest Generation, lived through the Great Depression when there never was a need to ask this question. They quit school and got any job they could to all pitch in and help the family survive. When they became adults, World War II impacted their lives. As young adults, there was no question again as to what they would be doing. They would be involved in a World War, whether they went to war or helped at home. As the country was young and thrown into a global war, everyone had to do whatever they could to help the country ramp up for war. So, most of our parents lived the first two or three decades of their lives being forced to do whatever was required for survival.
When World War II ended, there was such a feeling of pride and glory of defeating the evils of the world. This combined with the war’s need for industry to discover new methods of production now enabled the country to have its moment of economic growth that it had never known before. Think about the feeling of our parent’s generation going through an economic disaster, then a global war, getting through all of that with a huge feeling of pride and success! Now, it was time to celebrate and enjoy the fruits of their labor and sacrifice. This success was their legacy to their children, the Baby Boomers. This beginning of growth and pride of the United States of America brought jobs, new homes, better wages and babies.
Baby Boomers were born to a generation of people who came to the United States for freedom and opportunity and after World War II, and who began to realize these dreams. As children, now receiving the benefits of this American prosperity, Boomers didn’t need to be rich to feel rich and happy. Our world was made of television, toys, better education opportunities, even college and a generation that did not possess a fear of everything going away. Our’s was the age of the birth of “middle class”. Baby Boomers have never had the fear of failure of this country. As an obvious side note, there is never a time when life is prosperous for everyone, nor did every person have a glorious time as a Baby Boomer. That being said, the majority of Boomers lived in a time when their parents began seeing this as the great country they had always hoped it could be and they wanted their children to never have that fear in them. Boomers have not, until possibly the last few years, as we have seen and felt our retirement savings melt away during our economic crisis, felt that same fear.
Now that Baby Boomers are in an age of maturity and realizing their mortality, they are looking at life with perhaps, for the first time, the kind of fear that our parents felt when they were young. Boomers now have felt the fear of "how do we survive, especially with longer life expectancies?" The vision of living a life of retirement of the same model as their parents, Boomers wonder if their income during retirement will be enough. Due to the crisis of 2008, retirement is taking on a completely different aspect.
The generation that was asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” can find the key to the new retirement model by finally answering this question. As countless people in our country are all facing hard economic times, rather than looking at what retirement was “supposed” be, they need to find what they have always wanted to do, but never did as they chose careers based on amount of jobs and salaries, instead of pursuing their dreams as entrepreneurs, as their parents and grandparents did when they came to this country. When Boomers graduated from high school in the 1960’s, they were given advise on what jobs would be available and how much they paid. They were not asked, “what do you want to do” or “what can you do well”? We began our migration to living life as a means to and end, rather than look for how to use our true passions for our career choices.
When you do something you love and are good at, success and income become by-products and there is not the same reason to stop doing it and retire. The Baby Boomer Generation looked at retirement as an end of doing something that provided things and security. These career choices were most likely something that we looked forward to retiring from, as our reward for doing something we didn’t like doing most of our lives.
Now is the time for Boomers to get it right, find what they love and have a talent or expert knowledge of and then find a way to do it and earn some income from it. Income is no longer the focus, but a side effect that will provide for that “non-retirement, retirement”.
[...] While traveling is an eye-opening experience and a chance to see how others live in vastly different cultures. It is exhausting, on many levels. It quickly became clear to me that the romantic concept of traveling is flawed.
It's a great day! My wife and I have been married 15 years as of today. It's both our second marriage and today is definitely as good as when we first met! We met each other's true soul mates. I know this sounds cliche, but it's just so true! We are best friends and have been so since the first moment we met. So, don't give up hoping to find your soul mate. They are definitely out there. A fellow blogger (Rita Robinson, The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide ) brought to my attention that there was a recent AARP study that showed that there are some 20 million baby boomers out there and about 70% of them are interested in dating.
My wife and I met about year after we had divorced at work and funny thing is that we both have worked at the same company for about 20 years now. We didn't know each other all those years, but after we had gone through our divorces, we met at some company function and I knew immediately, that I felt a feeling I had never felt from any another person... EVER! That connection has been present every day since. There is no easy way to describe this, but just that it IS and it CAN happen.
Somehow, I feel as if we had known each other in some previous life.... it is that much of a connection!!!
I have to say that THE thing that hit me when I first met my wife is her ability to make anyone she talks to smile and instantly feel happy! I have seen it time and time again and have never seen anyone else in my life who was able to do that. Most of all, in our recent trials with my mother, going through the beginnings of Alzheimer's disease, my wife took care of her as if she was her own mother. All of the family's love did enable my mother to recover to the point of living on her own again, but no one did more or inspired the rest of us more than my wife.
The amazing thing I say to myself everyday, since I met her, is that I am the lucky one who actually gets to live with her all the time!!!
I am truly blessed.
Happy Valentine's Day to you all.... !
You can find some more interesting findings from these AARP reports here:
